With the growing capabilities of communication systems and technologies, companies and organizations have increasingly gravitated toward providing customer service through telecommunications and calling centers. Many businesses and organizations implementing such systems, however, are inundated with calls on a regular basis from customers who need immediate attention or prefer communicating via telephone. For example, many on-line retailers provide a customer service hotline for order status inquiries or complaints. Depending on the popularity of the retailer, such a customer service hotline may receive hundred or thousands of calls a day. Alternatively, a business may experience a high number of service requests due to a particular event. In one example, inclement weather may cause a widespread power outage and generate a significant volume of calls to the power company from customers affected by the outage.
Thus, to handle such high volumes of calls, many businesses and organizations have resorted to implementing a call holding system whereby incoming calls are placed in a queue until a live agent is available to handle the call. Consequently, those calling a customer service center may be required to wait in a queue for minutes or hours before a live agent is available to address their concerns.
During the hold time, callers must generally stay in close proximity to their telephones in order to know when an agent has picked up their call. A caller is thus limited in their activities until the call is fielded and their concerns are resolved. Even with the mobility of cellular telephones, a caller must still stay within a particular vicinity of the phone in order to detect that a live agent has come on the line. Additionally, hold time for a mobile telephone may translate to significant costs as many cellular networks charge mobile phone usage by the minute.
Furthermore, even when a live agent is available to handle a call, the agent may not be able to resolve the particular issue due to a variety of reasons, including a lack of expertise, lack of information and length of processing time. Agents are also often restricted to just a callback option when fielding a request or call. As such, a requesting party may experience further delays or inconvenience if the receiving agent is unable to handle the request. Thus, a lack of information and flexibility in handling queued requests on the part of the receiving party (i.e., an agent receiving the service requests) may result in significant inefficiencies.
For the foregoing reasons, a method and system for managing calls in a hold queue and responses from a receiving party is needed.